


Unspoken

by mediapuppy



Category: Henry Stickmin Series (Video Games)
Genre: M/M, Post-TT Ending, Selectively Mute Henry Stickmin, Slow Burn, Triple Threat Ending | TT (Henry Stickmin), come watch two idiots fall in love over the course of a few months, in this household we do not support ellie rose erasure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:35:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26381263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mediapuppy/pseuds/mediapuppy
Summary: Henry wants to know everything about Charles.  Henry's always wanted more than he's got.
Relationships: Charles Calvin & Ellie Rose & Henry Stickmin, Charles Calvin/Henry Stickmin, Past Charles Calvin/Konrad Bukowski
Comments: 70
Kudos: 403





	Unspoken

**Author's Note:**

> Look, this idea would not leave my head until I wrote it so have this Terrible, No Good fic of two stick figures falling in love while I cry over here about college. Warning for light drinking/smoking and everything else you'd expect from two adult children loose in a jungle base.

Henry’s on-base apartment is in a renovated bunker with rooms divided by shoddily-made walls that look like they were thrown up in a hurry, complete with big windows to make the narrow spaces feel larger than they really are. The uplifting all-grey color palette’s non-negotiable according to his contract, not to mention the fact that the living room is about the same size as his cell back in prison and features a couch that looks like it was rescued off of a street corner somewhere. 

But it’s free, and hey, Henry’s stayed in worse.

“We make a pretty good team,” Charles had said to him a few days before he moved in from the cockpit of his favorite helicopter. In the back Henry had sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Ellie after Charles had called them at ass o’clock in the morning to join him on a mission, the wind whipping in from the open helicopter door making their eyes water. Behind them what had once been a returning Toppat base burned embers into the sky, and when Charles turned around in his seat he only looked at Henry. “You guys should work with us more often, maybe like, a lot more often. The base isn’t too bad, and, I dunno, it would probably be easier to just stay there instead of me picking you both up from the city all the time.”

Three days later Henry said goodbye to his downtown loft and was given the keys to a humble single-bedroom apartment half the size that always smelled like the lumberjack section at Home Depot. By the next night Ellie was fully moved into an identical apartment across base and they finalized their contracts over eight dollar wine bordering on candy-sweet. Charles had a smile half the size of his face when he had given it to them as a gag housewarming gift and promised to get them a proper bottle when they earned it. The animals screaming in the jungle were a lot harder to get used to than the constant honking of angry drivers in the city, and no matter how many missions they did Charles had never gotten them that bottle of wine.

But it was just easier this way, Henry had reasoned. Having Charles fly into the city to pick them up all the time wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, and just once he’d like to take a walk without being stuck behind a group of teenagers blowing cotton candy clouds directly into his face.

This is completely ignoring the teeny tiny fact that Charles also has an apartment on base, which had absolutely nothing to do with his decision. At all.

It was just cheaper this way. Not like he had much of an income after he signed away his rights to ever return to his treasure-hunting days, a sorry fact that still felt like a bruise he couldn’t help but poke repeatedly. Here he was given three square meals a day and an apartment all his own in return for occasionally risking his life in the name of the government alongside two knuckleheads that had only slightly better self-preservation instincts than a lemming.

There are restrictions on what he can do and where he can go, but given that the base is still planted firmly in the middle of the jungle while the government distributes all stolen artifacts back to their rightful owners and round up straggling Toppat members, it’s not like he’d have much of a choice anyway. He has twenty mosquito bites on him minimum at all times, last week a monkey threw a rock at his head and he spent the rest of the afternoon unconscious in the dirt, and Henry’s pretty sure that one morning he’s going to wake up dangling upside-down from the flagpole.

All in all it’s marginally better than prison at least.

But it’s not all bad. Ellie stops by twice a week when they’re not on missions to critique terrible action movies on his shitty box television, and lately Charles has made a habit of hovering around the base looking like a lost puppy until Henry invites him inside for a couple episodes of Cutthroat Kitchen that make them laugh until their bellies ache. It’s quickly becoming a routine Henry doesn’t mind one bit, and secretly looks forward to after a few hours of mindlessly staring up at his white popcorn ceiling thinking of all the trouble he could get into with his free time.

It’s all fine and dandy until the day General Galeforce shows up on his metaphorical doorstep with a black dressing bag and informs him of all the mandatory events on base he has to attend, and two hours later Henry finds himself in an ill-fitting suit standing on the threshold of an old Toppat base-turned-banquet-hall with a headache already brewing just behind his eyes.

Parties weren’t exactly Henry’s scene if he didn’t have something to gain from it. Give him a goal or some big payoff at the end of the tunnel and he’d go to hell and back to reach it, regardless of who was in his path. Without those things Henry prefers watching. He likes seeing how others interact, but he doesn’t necessarily enjoy participating. It wasn’t that he doesn’t want to talk to them, or couldn’t, rather that he just doesn’t have anything to say most of the time.

Dread pools in his gut as he looks out amongst the crowd mingling under too-bright fluorescent lights. His head throbs.

He should eat, he thinks, that’ll help. But when he looks over at the buffet table General Galeforce is standing there with a woman poking him fiercely in the chest and smiling in a way that makes Henry’s skin crawl. He’s not going anywhere near the buffet table.

Standing is fine, actually. He can just stand here. It takes Henry two seconds to resign himself to his fate of hovering awkwardly on the outskirts of the party like an unwelcome ghost when he sees a familiar head in the crowd. Ellie smiles and waves when she sees him, her bottle red hair his big beacon of hope in this awfully crowded world. He shuffles over to her like his life depends on it.

“Hey, you,” Ellie says as Henry makes his way over to her, smiling around the edge of a champagne flute. Her lips are the same color as her hair. “So the general roped you into coming too, huh?”

Unlike him she seems to have been allowed to wear casual clothes. He suddenly hates her for it. But on closer inspection she does have a little black ring tying her hair back that looks suspiciously like a grenade pin, and Henry wisely does not ask her about the clothes thing. He nods.

“I think this is for, uh,” she pauses thoughtfully, as if she has any more of a clue than he does, “that new base we took down last week. Or because nobody managed to die over the weekend. I really don’t know, I think these guys will just take any excuse to drink.”

That sounds true enough, given Henry was pretty sure most of the guys here have their morning cereal with beer (he considers cereal with anything but fresh whole milk completely blasphemous, so this was enough to make him reel), a sight that has forced him to take most of his meals back to his apartment to eat sad and alone. For all he knows this entire shebang was put on just to celebrate their three day record of nobody accidentally shooting themselves in the foot. In their defense though, it is a new record.

Henry scratches the shoulder of his itchy suit, stops stiff, then nudges his chin up towards the buffet table where the general still looks scared and cornered with no end in sight. Ellie follows his eyes, stays quiet for a long moment, then:

“What is he doing?”

Over by the table was a man who was, by no short means, as oblivious as a drunk skunk. He strolls right on past the two gatekeepers from hell and right to the food under their noses like a bloodhound to leftovers. He has a soft, dopey face that only houses elevator music on the best of days and awful trap remixes on the worst, but at least it tends to be very catchy. His hair is wind-blown even inside and he’s got his headphones hanging around his neck, like the permanent accessory they always are. Henry bet the guy even slept with those on.

Looking at him it didn't matter how much Henry drank, or what he drank, because a few seconds later his mouth was as dry as a riverbed in drought anyway. The guy just had that sort of effect on people, Henry had long ago assumed. But he didn’t mention it, just in case he was wrong.

Henry looks at Charles and sighs.

“Should we, um, go save him?” Ellie asks with the sort of hesitation of a person who knows it’s hopeless, like watching your drunk friends careen down a steep street in a grocery cart and reckon, just for a moment, you might just be able to catch them if you leg it.

Sometimes you just have to hope for the best, and pray there isn’t a very inconvenient car rushing round the bend. Even so, Henry does have the urge to run over there and drag Charles underneath the table before the poor thing gets a knife in his hand for the trouble of trying to grab some food, car or not be damned.

Not that it matters much anyway because soon Charles and his deathwish make it over from where he’s been stealing loaves of bread from the buffet table, his hunger seemingly outweighing his sense of self-preservation. He ducks under the arm of the woman, whose hand is curled around the general’s tie like a leash, and comes trotting over to them with his bounty of breadsticks pressing against his chest.

At twenty-eight Henry’s built mean and solid in the sort of way that stretches the shoulders of his suit, years of running and the recent weeks of operations with the government making his arms and legs sturdy. Charles, for all the hours they spent together on missions, never seemed to get any of that. At twenty-eight Charles still has baby fat clinging to his cheeks that push up towards his eyes when he smiles and a skinny frame that easily drowns in anything baggy. Charles never bothered to buy clothes meant for his own body and judging from the suit he runs up in, the government didn’t bother to try either. Henry’s life would be so much simpler if Charles just got some clothes that fit.

“What are you guys doing over here?” Charles asks over some awful rendition of Camila Cabello’s _Havana_ playing through the banquet hall speakers.

“Watching you,” Ellie answers for the both of them, already knowing the routine with Henry after months of practice. “Why breadsticks? There’s, like, so much other food over there.”

There is, in fact, heaps of untouched sushi just above dollar store grade and a few plates of stuff that looks surprisingly edible. In comparison the breadsticks in Charles’ arms look more like blunt instruments to beat someone with than actual food.

“It’s bread,” Charles replies, like that explains anything. He nudges his chin down to his chest and grabs the end of one of the breadsticks with his teeth like a goddamn animal, spraying crumbs everywhere when he talks. “What, don’t tell me you heathens are on that new carb-free diet thing? Because I may have to just end our team right here if that’s the case, which would be very sad because I love you guys, but even I have standards.”

Luckily Ellie has the sense not to grimace too much when a few crumbs land on her cheek, but Henry can see the way her lip kicks up at the edge and her brow pinches in, the trademark Ellie Look of Disapproval™.

Charles must see it too because he holds out two rock-hard looking breadsticks like a peace offering. Henry takes both of them. They taste somehow staler than they look.

“Bread and scotch just go so well together,” Charles tries again, and that explains it, because Charles always has the urge to eat his own body weight in grease and carbs when he’s drunk. He's got sunburn that runs down his nose and blends into the scotch-flush across his cheeks, and there's some skin peeling in the space between his eyes. Henry resists the urge to point it out.

“I thought that woman was going to stab you,” Ellie admits with no ounce of concern, in fact, she’s smiling. She wipes her cheek with the back of her hand. “Or Galeforce. Or both of them. I thought you getting stabbed was definitely in the equation.”

For all the things Charles is, smart isn’t one of them, at least not conventionally. He’s got the precise know-how of a man completely comfortable behind the wheel of most any vehicle and the surprising ability to learn his company quick as a bullet, but he’s also got the observational skills of a hyperactive 3rd grader who just discovered the wonders of eating crayons.

Charles looks up at her, smiling around the half-bitten edge of a breadstick and laughs. “Oh, really? I didn’t even notice! Who do you think she is anyway?”

They both launch into a frenzy of theories where Charles smiles and laughs in all the right places, and Henry stands at their side occasionally nodding or shaking his head when a particularly raunchy theory is thrown at him. It’s comfortable, falling into their usual routine. They’re still at it half an hour later when Charles has gone through half the breadsticks on his own and pawned the rest off on starving soldiers understandably too afraid to get too close to the general and his vicious lady friend, who they’re starting to think may just be a very well-disguised assassin. If that’s the truth then they’ll have some very sorry words to say over his coffin in the morning.

Henry’s inhaled two glasses of something brown and strong and is on his third when Ellie leaves their trio of safety to hang out with a friend (when did she have time to make friends?), leaving Henry and Charles alone with their backs against the wall, surveying the banquet hall with all of the tipsy disdain usually reserved for rejected seniors on prom night. Charles has traded in his last stale breadstick for a glass of something that smells like straight whiskey and has spent the last several minutes nursing it with big, gulping sips. 

With Ellie gone they talk about simple, meaningless things that get them both chuckling under their breaths, like how awful their suits are and how much better it would be to climb the ivy-wound trellis up to the roof just to escape being here. Well, more Charles talks and Henry listens, and Henry likes it that way just fine. Charles is one of the only people in the world who can figure him out, has memorized his little tics and mannerisms that give away so much more than words ever could. So, yeah, Charles was a smart guy, at least where it mattered. Charles knew him, and he knew Charles. 

“Lemme tell you something, hear me out, lemme tell you something,” Charles says to Henry suddenly, who is standing there patiently, waiting for Charles to tell him. 

“Okay, you see Konrad over there?” Charles points over to a group of people with so much enthusiasm he wobbles on his feet a bit. His drink sloshes and slides down the side of the glass.

It takes Henry’s liquor-addled brain a few seconds to catch up, but he eventually registers the trademark blonde hair of the twins, although he’s not sure which is which. The Bukowski twins had never really struck Henry as the brightest bulbs in the box. Case in point: the twins were currently drinking out of their own hats, their hands sticky and wet with all the liquid seeping through the fabric.   
  
“Hmm?” Henry hums, distracted. 

“We used to date,” Charles blurts out. 

“What?” Henry doesn’t yell, but it’s an almost thing. 

Henry looks down at Charles so fast he can hear the tendons in his neck creaking; protesting. But Charles is looking down at the surface of his drink, at the garbled reflection of his own face there. He looks sad, the smile lines along the edges of his lips pulling at his cheeks in a way that makes Henry want to reach out and hug him. There’s no way he’s joking.

“Oh yeah, he broke up with me,” Charles continues before Henry has a chance to process this new meteor of information, at this entire new side of him Henry had no idea existed until this very moment. And something in Henry bristles at that. It’s a stupid, petty feeling that shocks him something fierce with the intensity of it. Henry doesn’t want to examine it, just lets it pass as easily as it came until it’s nothing more than an irritable simmer beneath his skin. 

“Hmm?” Henry hums again, surprising himself with how high it comes out. Luckily Charles seems too drunk to notice. 

“God, yeah, it was rough y’know? I didn’t really see it coming,” Charles says, then laughs. It’s not a good laugh, more of a bark than anything else. It sounds pained. “But hey, you live and let go, right? Live and let liver, what’s the saying?” 

Henry shrugs, not quite trusting his voice to behave. His mind reels, the buzz of alcohol slapped out of him with the force of a roundhouse kick. He’s staring at Konrad with the sort of wide-eyed look that would send Konrad bursting into smithereens if they made eye contact.

If Charles notices this he doesn’t say anything. “Do you, uh, have any exes?” Charles asks quietly, trying to take the attention off himself, Henry quickly realizes.

“Um,” Henry starts, stops, trying not to completely lose his shit. Henry thinks of the people he’d been with in the past, the nameless, faceless people whose checkbooks had been bigger than their hearts, going through life with the sort of cold civility of wealthy movie villains always on the edge of something. People he’d kept at arms length at all times, never close enough to establish anything. Henry shakes his head. 

Henry’s always been quite proud of himself for how quickly he can tally up a character. It only took him a few seconds to know he could trust Ellie, and even quicker to know he could trust Charles. In the weeks they’d been together Henry had learned every brand of smile Charles had; the looks he gave when he was stressed and trying not to give it away, the way his forehead wrinkled when he was fighting to keep his eyes open, how he sings at the top of his lungs during dangerous missions to get the anxiety out. Henry knows every version of Charles, but he doesn’t know this one. Henry can feel his heart hammering in his chest, crawling up his throat until he’s almost choking on it.

It was quiet then for a few seconds, minutes, for what felt like _years_ as they both stood there staring without seeing, their shoulders barely touching. 

“I think I’m gonna go get another drink,” Charles pipes up suddenly, all of his previous gusto gone. He sounds sad. Then he’s disappearing into the crowd, and he didn’t invite Henry to go with him, so Henry stands there watching him go, not sure if it’s appropriate to go after him. After a couple of minutes of avoiding eye contact with just about everyone he’s ever met on the base Henry decides to cut his losses (because that’s his teammate, dammit) and starts in the direction he saw Charles disappear in. 

Only he must be more out of it than he thinks because it takes him the longest twenty minutes of his life to realize Charles isn’t in the room at all. Henry makes his way towards the open back door with all of the rabid anxiety of a man shuffling towards the edge of a cliff, thinking of how it all went so wrong so quickly. The lights inside are bright, too bright, and when he side-shuffles through the door it takes his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. 

Henry hadn’t pegged Charles as the smoking type, but apparently there was a lot about Charles he didn’t know because here they were: outside on the balcony with the warm winds coming down from the jungle that makes Henry feel unmistakably sticky all over, the ice in his drink clinking against the sides as he moves, and Charles staring at him over the fat head of a cigar, cherry glowing in the dim light.

Charles smiles at him. It’s the smile of a very drunk man; loose and warm in the best of ways, the sort of sincerity that can only be accomplished when the rest of the world is muted and faraway. Henry feels suddenly hot under the force of it. 

“Henry, hey,” Charles greets him, seemingly unsurprised to see Henry had followed him out. He shuffles on one foot, cherry streaking against the night sky. 

“Hey,” Henry replies, to the shock of them both. His voice is rough from disuse but surprisingly sturdy given the circumstances, it rides out on a nervous little laugh when Charles absolutely beams at him in response. He swallows. His mouth feels dry. It always does around Charles.

“Not that I'm not happy to see you, Henry. But, did you, uh, you follow me out here for a reason?” Charles asks innocently enough, and god, Henry wishes he could answer that question himself.

Seeing Charles disappear into the crowd after that weird moment between them had set him off in a way he wouldn’t examine unless forced to. Henry wants to say, because I was worried about you. Because you said some weird stuff back there that I never expected to come from you, and now you sort of look like a completely different person. I thought I knew everything about you - but I didn’t know any of that, and now I want to figure out how much I don’t know. If you’ll let me.

But he doesn’t say any of that. Instead, Henry shrugs, his eyes trailing down to Charles’ cigar, tilting his head.

Charles looks down at his hands, at the cigar pinched between his thumb and forefinger as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, uh, I dunno, about this. I guess you just pick up some things out here, ya’know? Does it, uh, bother you? Because I can put it out.”

Up close Henry can smell the smoke on Charles’ breath when he talks, that musky heaviness that settles on his own tongue like ash, makes his throat feel thick and his mouth dry. He shakes his head, nudges his chin up and towards the door they’d both come through.

Charles follows his eyes and just _knows_ what he means, and it’s one of the many reasons Henry finds himself so fond of him. “Yeah, god, I’m sorry about all that. I just,” Charles stops, which is awful, because in the space between his breaths Henry swears he can hear Charles trying to pull himself together, and he’s so out of his element here that it makes him want to do something stupid. “I’m sorry.”

Henry looks at him, and for the first time he has no idea what to say to him, how to regard him. It’s like seeing layers of Charles peel away to the very core of him, and Henry wonders who else has seen Charles like this — this vulnerable and open and so unlike the person he usually is. Henry wants to fall into this pit with him and never get back out, a thought that wouldn’t quite register until well after the alcohol has left his system.

“Aw man, hey, we need to watch that new episode of Cutthroat Kitchen soon,” Charles says all in one breath, smile back in full force. He’s not looking at Henry, Henry wishes he was. “Hey, do you, uh, do you think if we stole the general’s flamethrower we could make steak with it? He - he totally has a flamethrower, don’t give me that face. Look, I have the best plan—”

Charles’ plan involves one military grade flamethrower and an unhealthy amount of butter. He doesn’t mention Konrad the whole time and Henry doesn’t know if he should bring it up, or go inside and drag the man of the hour out himself so they can both tip his body over the balcony into the dense jungle below, or if he should put his hand on Charles’ back and rub in slow, gentle circles until he wants to talk about it again.

Henry doesn’t do any of that, because all he can think about is the startling revelation that Charles likes _guys_. Or guy, singular. Had liked one particular guy that made the worst mistake in the world by letting him go. It’s stupid, and it shouldn’t matter, but it’s a bruise against his brain Henry can’t stop jabbing at until it’s all he is. Henry thinks about Charles and Konrad together, the way Charles had looked when he was talking about him, so sad and earnest all at once. It was like walking into the tailend of a good movie, and all Henry wants is to rewind rewind rewind until he gets every single last detail.

“—oh shit, general’s looking. Take this, I gotta go before he kills me,” Charles is saying. He’s standing beside him now, and when did that happen? He’s got the cigar pressing against his lips and takes a long, slow drag of it before offering it up to Henry butt first. Henry takes it in a daze, staring meaningfully into the darkness of the jungle over Charles’ shoulder.

The air is cold, even colder where Charles leans in and puts his hand on Henry’s shoulder, lets it linger there for a casual moment as he passes by into the banquet hall.

Henry lets the cigar settle heavy between his teeth and tries not to think about how Charles’ lips had curled around it not a moment before.  
  


* * *

  
Ellie agrees to take a very drunk Charles back to his apartment (where they both live next to each other, Henry remembers sullenly, the traitors) because neither of them trust Charles to shamble his way there on his own, and the last thing they need is for the general to find him half-naked asleep in a bush somewhere where he was liable to get eaten alive by mosquitos. Ellie asks Henry to come and only stares at him for a beat when he quickly refuses, too tired to fight him on something so insignificant. He’s exhausted, and a little drunk himself, and the last thing he wants is to stumble across the base alone in the dark and suffer the same fate Charles would.

Underneath that lie is the truth that if he went back to Charles’ apartment he wouldn’t leave. Charles has given him a line tonight, a line cast deep into the recesses of his mind where curiosity tugs at it furiously. The truth is that Charles makes him feel all of sixteen years old again, excited and scared and yearning for something undefinable. Charles is so kind it hurts and hopeful in a way that makes you love him for trying so hard. Henry knows how Charles always forgets his sunscreen on missions yet manages to only get burnt on his nose every time, he knows how Charles treats his helicopter like his child and secretly dances when he thinks nobody’s looking. 

Charles also apparently smokes cigars, drinks like a college freshman, and once upon a time dated a man that treats him like he doesn’t exist. These things shouldn’t matter, and they don’t, but it opens up a whole new side of a man Henry had been convinced he knew every corner of. He’s the kind of wonderful that’s awful, and when Henry starts to think of all the years he spent not knowing every avenue Charles had taken to get where he is today he can’t help but feel a pang of selfishness - this was a person he had spent weeks convinced he knew everything about, only for Charles to cast that all aside in a single night of drunken laughs. Charles is a pit in the darkest depths of the ocean, and Henry wants to get lost finding the bottom, to keep every single inch and secret to himself.

But he doesn’t know how to explain any of that without sounding insane.

One day he’d have the words, and when he did those words would be simple. But today’s not that day, so Henry leans back, chews on the inside of his cheek, and watches Ellie loop her arm over Charles’ shoulder.

* * *

  
Henry tries not to think about Charles in training, the people he’d seen and touched, the people who had touched him in return - Henry tries not to think about all the versions of this man that he’d never have the pleasure of seeing. Henry wants to ask, have you done this before? The whole team thing? I’ve never even asked you about how long you’ve been here, and I honestly feel kind of bad about it. Was Konrad on your team once, is that how you met? Did you two start dating then?

Who was the first person you dated? Was it girls first, then guys? Do you even like girls? I think you do, I mean, if you’d like anybody I assumed it would be girls. But you dated Konrad, so maybe you just like guys. Was Konrad the only guy you’ve dated? Have you dated anybody since? I think I should know these things about you, but the more I think the more I realize I don’t know. I want to know these things, is it okay for me to want to know? I know you have a home somewhere off base you go back to, because you can’t just camp out in the helicopter when you're not on base. Is there somebody there waiting for you to come home, to come to bed?

Henry thinks about the way Charles will sometimes turn to him in the helicopter and smile lopsided and careless, and Henry thinks, did you smile like that for him? Is that even your real smile? I never really thought about it before, but I always thought that smile was just for me, and, how did you smile for him? Was it different, a different you reserved just for him?

Henry lays in bed with cigar breath in the back of his throat and stares up at the white ceiling of his apartment and thinks, have you ever thought about me like this? Are you curious? Have you ever wondered about me and Ellie? Because you never asked, and I kind of wanted you to, so I could tell you no, that I’d never quite swung that way. What would you have said? Would you of said anything? 

But Henry tries not to think about it.

He thinks about it all night. 

* * *

They’re 15,000 feet in the air when Charles turns to him and says, “relax, I have the best plan.”

Charles proceeds to nose the helicopter down at a surviving Toppat base and it takes Henry all of .5 seconds to realize what he’s doing and dive for the controls.

They narrowly miss the base thanks to Henry using the helicopter’s grappling hook to slingshot them around and back into the air, but they do semi-crash land along the mountainside in a clearing between some gnarled looking trees. Charles had the good sense to stay in his seat with his seatbelt on, but Henry, who had been leaning out of the side door with the grappling hook, is ejected into the clearing against his will when the helicopter skids to a stop. Henry spends the first few seconds on solid ground laying face-down in the dirt while Charles scrambles out of the helicopter after him, and then spends another few seconds trying not to groan as the adrenaline wears off and every muscle in his body aches with a vengeance.

Henry can hear Charles’ hurried footsteps in the dirt followed by a whooshing of air filling a space it had no longer been in, then bursting. The footsteps skid to an abrupt halt, then thump in a direction that’s not him. Mustering up his strength Henry twists his head to get a good look at what had just happened.

Charles named his helicopter Iron Charles The Brave, in the hope that one day someone would ask him why. Henry had adamantly refused to be the one to do it, and now it seems nobody ever will. Behind them Iron Charles The Brave burns valiantly against the underbrush, the crackling metal shell drowning out the sounds of Charles’ devastated whimpers.

“Noooo, Iron Charles!” Charles booms dramatically, he’s knelt down in the dirt, cheeks streaked with two tasteful lines of mud on either side. Henry, who still can’t feel the top half of his body, lays there staring at Charles’ back until he finally turns around and notices him. 

“Oh, uh, Henry. You okay?” Charles asks. He at least has the decency to sound apologetic. 

Henry is not. He gives Charles a thumbs up anyway before unceremoniously passing out. 

When he comes to Charles has his arms wrapped around his shoulders and is half holding Henry up against his chest. Above them a rescue helicopter hovers noisily, successfully shooting a pound of dirt directly into Henry’s corneas. 

“Oh thank god,” Charles sighs when he notices he’s awake. He’s got mud on his chin and his hair’s whipping in every direction that almost makes it look like he’s going to take flight on his own. There’s a strip of naked skin along his belly where his shirt’s ridden up because of Henry’s elbow jabbed against his side, and his eyes look suspiciously wet. He looks beautiful.

Henry, definitely not choking on his own tongue, groans.

The rescue helicopter (God, how long was he out for?) comes to rest a few yards away from them and the pilot, a big burly man Henry doesn’t recognize, hangs his arm out of the side door and waves them over. 

Henry briefly considers trying to get up, but Charles has his arms around him, and he doesn’t quite trust his legs to do anything but melt into jell-o, so Henry doesn’t complain when Charles slides his arms underneath his back and gets onto his knees, which is almost as bad as an idea as his last one, because—

Charles struggles to even get him off the ground bridal style. Henry doesn’t even have his arms over Charles’ shoulder. Charles huffs, his body straining before he’s even stood up. “Don’t worry buddy, I gotcha. Just gonna get you up there. I got this.”

“Really?” Henry groans pathetically, remembering he’s got a few good inches on Charles and about forty pounds.

“Abso-likely!” Charles says with all of the confidence of a man who does not in fact got this. 

After trying and failing to lift Henry into the helicopter Charles tries it fireman style instead, which is a lot less dignified, and ends up with Charles almost ramming Henry ass-first into the helicopter’s tail blades before the pilot finally decides to get out of the cockpit and carry Henry inside himself. 

Afterwards they’re both in the backseats while the pilot flies them home and Henry feels the tendons and muscles in his body screaming. His shoulders ache and it takes every ounce of his strength just to keep himself upright, so when the helicopter hits a bad patch of turbulence and it pitches him sideways into Charles’ lap he doesn’t bounce up right away. Henry puts his face against Charles’ body. The well-worn feeling of his t-shirt against his cheek, and the soft of his belly underneath is a great comfort. Charles doesn’t move away, or push Henry off, so he takes that as an invitation to stay.

“It’s been a long day, huh?” Charles finally says. He sounds casual, but Henry can sense the underlying concern.

Henry groans noncommittally into Charles’ shirt, trying not to shiver when Charles laughs and the sound vibrates through his whole body. Henry can feel him breathing. He’s really warm.

“Aw man, I’m sorry. Look, this one is on me. Can I, uh, get you a drink or something back at base to make up for it?” He pauses, Henry can feel him shift, probably to accomodate for the forty pounds of head in his lap, and he really must look as bad as he feels, because then Charles adds: “I mean, when you’re up for it of course.”

Henry doesn’t want to do anything other than lay here, and he certainly doesn’t want to be dragged off to the base bar where the bartender leans in just a little too close, asks too many questions whenever he comes in, smiles mean with a jagged tooth caught on the fat of his bottom lip. He hates that bar. But he doesn’t hate Charles, and he knows from past experience that a guilty Charles just means a Charles more eager to ‘help’, which if today was anything to go by was liable to get them both killed.

With that in mind Henry couldn’t nod fast enough, which was still considerably sluggish given he’d had his life flash before his eyes no less than five times in the past hour. His neck protests the movement and sends horrible jolts of pain down his spine like he stepped on live wire. Henry’s breath stutters, gasps a little. He resists the urge to bury his face in Charles’ shirt, the way children do to their mothers when they’re scared.

He should move, he thinks. Henry’s neck is pinched at an awkward angle here he knows will ache something fierce in the morning, and he’s sure Charles would rather spend their hour flying back in any other way than with a head in his lap. So Henry gets an elbow up to move when Charles’ hand pushes underneath his cheek and cradles his head without being asked to, cushioning him, his other hand settling firm and comforting on the back of his head.

It’s a little thing. A little, intimate thing and it suddenly makes Henry’s chest feel like it’s pumping air instead of blood. The skin beneath Charles’ fingers burns, the thin hair along the back of his neck standing to attention. He holds his breath, closes his eyes, focuses on the soft rise and fall of Charles’ breathing against his head until the feeling subsides. 

Suddenly, he feels Charles’ thumb rubbing gently up and down the back of his neck. Henry tries not to think about what it means.

* * *

Not thinking usually wasn’t an issue for Henry, who opts to just jump into a situation with careless abandonment and let fate take control of the wheel for a while. He loves the thrill of it all, he loves feeling raw and alive with the world as it roars past him, he loves the sensation of danger breathing hot and heavy on the backs of his ankles as he sprinted down a hallway he doesn’t belong in.

But the thing is, he _wants_ to think about Charles. He wants to know every single inch of him. Henry wants to know the way Charles acts when he thinks nobody’s looking and how he likes his eggs in the morning. There’s a version of Charles he’s created in his head during missions and the sparse free time they spend together, a Charles that’s kind and so trusting it almost hurts. Henry wants to know every version of Charles, has wanted to know ever since the night at the party where Charles had smiled over the zig-zag of his fingers folded around a cigar and given him a tantalizing glimpse of a person he had never really known. Henry wants to know the unknown years before they met, wants to know how the jut of Charles’ hip bones feels against the curve of his lips and the noises Charles makes when he’s held in the way most men aren’t. It’s a selfish, awful want, and it fuels him like nothing ever has. 

And maybe this is just a normal way to think about your partner. He’s curious about Ellie too - who she is and who she used to be, why she was in The Wall to begin with. Henry wonders if she’s always had such a casual approach to life and danger and if she ever gets scared when they’re out on a mission even though she never shows it. 

This is normal. It’s normal to think about them, _both_ of them, and want to know more. He loves them both equally, as friends.

* * *

Charles gets sick, and it takes Henry all of two seconds to bail on his covert mission with Ellie to dead sprint across the base to get to Charles’ apartment. When he gets there the door is locked and no amount of banging gets him anything other than a red hand, so Henry flattens himself with a cartoon anvil from his back pocket and slides underneath the bottom of the door.

Henry has never been in Charles’ apartment before, at least not in his waking moments. His dreams had furnished it - well, if he was being honest, kind of like the inside of a helicopter. He just couldn’t imagine Charles in anything else. 

In reality it’s nicer than his own apartment, which is something Henry files away to discuss with the general later. It’s got the same layout as his own apartment with the addition of hardwood floors instead of tacky khaki carpet and Henry navigates it seamlessly, turning down the hallway to the master bedroom at the end, only to creek open the door and find it empty.

“Charles?” Henry calls out. His nerves are getting the better of him because he swears he can hear his voice crack on the last syllable. He walks (definitely not runs) back down the hall and into the living room.

There’s not much that rattles him these days, years of fighting and cold-hearted treasure hunting giving Henry nerves of almost steel, but the sight of Charles’ bare feet sticking out from around the bathroom door stops Henry in his tracks, makes his heart flutter like the wings of a bird trapped in a garage.

Charles is conscious and breathing, which is more than Henry had expected when he crashes into the bathroom door at mach 5 and sees Charles laying down on the cold tiles, his head balancing between the toilet bowl and the wall. His skin is pale and the pink, sick flush to his cheeks reaches all the way up to the tips of his ears, and when he cracks an eye open to look at Henry disheveled and sweaty in the doorway his eyes are glazed. 

“Henry?” Charles whisper-talks up at him. He squints as if he can’t believe what he’s seeing, face all scrunched up. He asks again, “Henry?”

In a second Henry’s down on his knees next to him. It smells. It’s hot, which makes the smell worse. Charles looks awful. This is awful.

“What should I do?” Henry asks, all fumbling hands and hovering, gentle touches, as if Charles would shatter into a million pieces if he so much as breathed wrong in his direction. 

“I’m okay,” Charles speaks like he’s breathing, voice wispy and raw, and he sounds so soft and miserable that it makes something desperately protective flare in Henry’s chest, the same aching feeling he gets watching sad pet commercials and seeing empty birds nests.

He’s not okay, none of this is okay. In an instant Henry has the mental image of scooping Charles up into his arms bridal style and whisking him away to safety, which is a fantasy he shoves deep, deep down until only a sliver of it remains. 

“What,” Charles starts, a wave of nausea rolling over his features that has Henry caught between scrambling away out of puke range and diving in closer to lovingly scoop Charles’ hair back. He ends up doing neither. “What are you doing here?”

“Sick, general said so,” Henry replies dumbly, because this is already more than he’s spoken in a long, long time, and his brain is overloading with the amount of unspoken junk jumbled up in his head. 

It takes Charles a few seconds to process this, when he does his eyes go wide. For one awful, stunning second Henry’s convinced he’s going to cry, or puke, or both. 

It’s a relief when he laughs instead, albeit weakly.

“Oh my god, I’m fine,” he doesn’t look fine, but Henry lets him continue, “you eat three-day-old shrimp once and everyone thinks you’re dead! My stomach is made of steel, Henry, steel! I will not be taken out this easily!”  
  
Charles’ laugh and his chapped, snot-crusted smile is refreshing in a way that untenses all of the muscles in Henry’s body he hadn’t even known were tense. 

When Charles’ expression suddenly shifts to a frown all of Henry’s previously untense muscles re-tense, along with about fifty others he hadn’t even knew existed.

“Did you leave the mission?” Charles asks accusingly, and god, Henry’s really gotta work on his poker face because Charles takes one look at him and launches into some spiel about responsibility and teamwork that Henry only half listens to, more focused on the glaring fact that Charles is wearing nothing but a pajama shirt and a pair of too-tight boxers that leave nothing to the imagination.

It’s almost a blessing that Charles leans over and vomits halfway through telling Henry how shitty of a teammate he’s being today to Ellie so Henry’s more preoccupied with holding back sweaty locks of hair than staring at Charles’ unmentionables. Between spitting up and little sniffles (which Henry is sure to reassure Charles are very manly) Henry stumbles out an apology that mostly consists of shifty eyes and complicated hand gestures, but Charles gets it anyway, because it’s Charles. 

“I think I’m done. Come watch TV with me,” Charles says as he flushes the toilet, does not ask. He smiles. It’s not his drunk smile, or the lopsided one he’ll sometimes give him during missions, but another kind of sincere that feels strangely private and wonderful for Henry to witness.

Which is a great idea, because he can just let Charles take the lead before he can do something stupid. Before he can cradle Charles against his chest and run breathless and stupid to the on-base medical wing, or empty his bank account and fly Charles to the best hospital in the world somewhere, or shove him into an ice bath and shush his tired, confused whimpers. These are all awful ideas, and Henry regrets getting all of his caretaking information from shitty late night romcoms on Lifetime and HBO. Maybe he should’ve taken Ellie’s offer to watch House with her.

It takes a few seconds of bickering before Charles convinces Henry he doesn’t need to be carried or dragged over to the sofa like a child, but once they do get there Henry insists on getting everything from the kitchen himself, which Charles allows. When he gets back Charles already has a rerun of Cutthroat Kitchen running on the television and is smiling like it’s a secret shared between them. Henry definitely doesn’t shiver when he sits down and feels Charles’ body heat radiating against his side.

Charles spends the first hour running back and forth from the bathroom, but his body seems to settle after the fourth trip where he collapses on the couch with his head against the armrest and insists they order pizza. Henry refuses, but then Charles has his feet in his lap and is looking at him with puppy eyes he wants to sink into, and Henry is drowning, drowning.

Pizza arrives an hour and a half later, and Henry watches as Charles inhales two slices before Henry’s even gotten the plates from the kitchen. His body behaves, so after thirty minutes of none of it coming back up Henry lets him have another slice, then another, and then they’re both laughing over stupid shit on television with mouths full of melting, globby cheese.

“I love hanging out with you,” Charles says, smiling up at him with shiny grease-stained lips. His eyes are warm - everything about Charles is always indescribably warm and inviting.

Henry sinks into it like a hot bath.

* * *

It's close to three in the morning when Henry wakes up with pizza grease dried on the corner of his lips and Charles asleep pressed against his shoulder. Charles feels hot, but not as hot as he had before, his face upturned and open-mouthed with his lips against Henry’s neck. Charles is breathing warm and heavy into his skin in a way that makes Henry’s entire body break out in a cold sweat, goosebumps rippling across his arms and legs like the tide being viciously sucked out to sea.

There’s infomercials playing on the television that casts the room in a soft white glow, and they’re both damp, Charles’ fever probably having broken sometime in the night, dowsing his shirt and boxers with a fine layer of clammy sweat that pulls the fabric in odd ways across his body. His shirt is twisted around his torso, riding up to show the flat of his belly, and one corner of his boxers is rolled down to expose the sharp jut of a hip bone. His mouth, soft from sleep and grease, stares up at him expectantly.

Strange, he thinks, how normal it seems. With anybody else Henry would have gently pushed them off and been on his way, but he doesn’t get that urge with Charles. This feels precious and private in a way Henry can’t describe but desperately wants to hold on to, he wants to take a snapshot of this moment and live inside of it forever with only Charles and the faint humming of the television for company.

It’s a feeling he doesn’t want to forget and doesn’t want to examine, and certainly doesn’t understand - maybe that’s why he pushes Charles up as carefully as possible, lays him back down on the couch, then sprints out the front door without even bothering to say goodbye.

It doesn’t occur to him that he ran out without even putting on his shoes until he’s standing aimlessly in the middle of his living room breathing in ragged gasps, sweat (both his and Charles’, he remembers with a shiver) making his shirt stick to his back. His feet ache, but the sensation is faraway and unimportant.

Henry stands there and feels all of sixteen years old again; young and scared and vulnerable and unable to hide any of it, because he should be sad. He should be disgusted, and angry, and feeling things he’s not, because he’s spent the entire day cleaning up Charles’ sick to the tune of his phone constantly buzzing in his back pocket in what was probably the general’s rabid attempt to get ahold of him and murder him through the static connecting them for bailing on the mission. 

In a few hours the general will come busting down his door, and Ellie will give him that sharp, disappointed look she always gives him when he fucks up, and he’ll have to sit there and explain himself. But the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes how willing he is to do that, because it had been for Charles. 

Charles has got a sort of casual, genial approach to life that would piss Henry off in anybody else, but he’d become oddly fond of it in Charles. He’d become so fond of everything about that man. Charles could have thrown up on him and made him run to the store sixty miles away for a specific type of medicine and changed every channel right as it was getting to the good part and Henry would have smiled and endured it all, because—

The gears in his head turn. It all click-clicks into place.

Henry realizes, suddenly and terribly, that he might be a little bit in love.

* * *

“I think I love you,” Henry mouths behind Charles’ back one night during a dinner banquet for their squad two days after Charles declares himself better. Everyone’s drunk up to their eyes in whiskey sours and Henry’s squished between two soldiers he doesn’t even pretend to know the names of, too concentrated on the fact that Charles is sat at a table a few feet away without him. Charles never brought up Henry’s little disappearing act and Henry never asked him to, despite how much he had wanted to with all of his heart. 

Henry wants so much. He doesn’t know why he wants so much.

Charles laughs at something General Galeforce says across the table and when he does his nose scrunches up and his eyes squeeze shut, and suddenly Henry has never wanted to laugh with someone so much in his entire life. But neither of them look at him, so Henry stares down into the bottom of his glass and says nothing.

Henry tells himself not to think about it. He’s never been very good at following orders.

* * *

It doesn’t take long for Henry to completely obliterate his pledge to mental abstinence. About five minutes, in fact.

In his defense it’s not even him that brings the topic up.

“You missed the mission,” Ellie says in lieu of a greeting, fishing her hand out from where she had shoved it in the middle of the elevator doors to stop him running away without her, stepping in beside him.

Henry sighs, the sounds of dinner and laughs disappearing around them as the doors slide shut. In its place the silence was deafening: the sound of his breaths stopping dead tide in his lungs. He’s trapped and vulnerable and alone with her. Sometimes he hates how smart she is.

Henry presses the button for the ground floor and says nothing. The elevator starts its slow descent.

“So, how’s Charles?” Ellie asks, almost accusingly.

And that, that stings. The last time he saw her was when he was running out of the general’s tent as fast as his legs would carry him after the general told them Charles was too sick to be their personal chauffeur for the day. The idea of staying with her hadn’t even occurred to him. Henry curls away from her, ashamed.

She sees it, she must, because after a tense second of silence she says: “I’m not mad. I’m sorry. I was just mad you never said anything after. Charles looked okay tonight though, so that’s a relief. Right?”

“Yeah.” Earlier at the dinner Charles had laughed so hard he almost choked on some mashed potatoes and Konrad, the bastard, had smacked his back and let his hand linger there. At his sides Henry’s fists tighten. “He did.”

Henry doesn’t see it but he can _feel_ Ellie’s eyes boring into his side, down along his arm and back up to his face, the way the smile lines along the edges of his lip deepen with his frown. She’s always been the most perceptive of their trio, which wasn’t too big an accomplishment given her competition.

“I don’t get why you just don’t tell him,” Ellie says.

“What?” Henry asks, because one of these days playing dumb will work out for him.

“Henry,” she says, and the way she says it makes something lodge in his throat, her soft, knowing tone a weighted blanket draped over his shoulders. “Talk to me.”

Suddenly, the floor under Henry’s feet feels like it’s crackling. A myriad of spider-webs spreading across the surface of thin glass threatening to send him plunging into the abyss, to swallow him whole. Henry lost his fear of heights and falling at too young an age, but it resurfaces so quickly that it makes him feel sick.

The urge to run rears its ugly head in him, just as it always has for the past twenty years of his life. He’s spent his entire life running away from things both real and not, and his body has been carved by this. His legs twitch. He resists.

He’s tired of not thinking and thinking and feeling wrong while doing either of these things for intangible reasons he can’t explain or grasp. There’s an element of guilt at play for everything he does involving Charles now, as if he’s going to somehow ruin him by association, and he’s spent so much time the past two days Eeyore-ing around the base that he’s surprised it’s taken someone this long to call him out on his shit.

He’s glad he doesn’t have to pretend to be fine anymore, because he isn’t. He’s a mess, and it feels good to stop pretending he’s anything else. In the end he’s glad it’s Ellie who finally calls him out, because she takes one look at his wreck of a face and just knows in that unspeakable way she always does. She lets him lean silently against her shoulder as the floors tick away above them, her hand against his back as he thinks and thinks and thinks.

More specifically, Henry thinks about how he _can’t_ be in love with Charles. 

Not because he isn’t, because he is, and it’s a fact that makes him want to scream and cry all at once, but rather that loving Charles would be a disaster none of them deserve to be subjected to. Least of all Charles.

Ellie’s hand rests against the bump of his shoulder blade through his jacket, a warm and comforting weight. “I think the only one who doesn’t know is him, Henry. You know he won’t ever find out unless you show him, so stop torturing yourself by trying to shove it down. What are you so afraid of?”

Rejection, for starters, Of ruining something he’s spent so long protecting and even longer convinced he’d never have, having gone so long running that he feels motion-sick just staying still. Of abstract, intangible things that don’t even make sense to him but sometimes feels as if it’s all he is. He’s spent his entire life never satisfied to fill an empty space he hadn’t even realized existed until this very moment, because friends and family was something he just observed and never partook in. Having those things now feels precious, more precious than any jewel, and he’s so afraid that one wrong step will bring the whole thing dropping and shattering beneath his hands.

“I like now,” Henry says, the words just spilling out of him without any real conscious thought. An uncorked bottle of champagne finally overflowing. “What - what if this ruins it? What if he hates me? You guys, finally someone _gets me_ , and, and I can’t—”

“Hey, hey,” Ellie interrupts him, soft and certain. “It’s Charles, I don’t even think that man is capable of hate. If anything he’d probably apologize for making you feel that way.”

Which is almost worse, and Ellie must see it on his face, because she backtracks. “Okay, um, maybe not the best way to put it. Look, it’s _Charles_ , Henry. He’s crazy about you! Have you noticed that he’s literally only ever looking at you when you’re there? It’s actually really annoying but you never notice because you’re only looking at him too! I have literally never seen two more oblivious people in my life and I’m shocked you’ve both survived this long.”

That punches a laugh out of Henry. “Hey, I survived a long time without you two.”

“But now you don’t have to do anything without us anymore,” Ellie frowns, her face screwing up a little.

He loves Ellie. In this moment he’s never loved Ellie more, and all at once he realizes how lucky he is to have her. Ellie’s smart and frighteningly independent, perhaps even more so than he is, and like Charles she has the often unnerving ability to see right through him. His throat tightens a bit, feels raw and achy when he swallows and blinks perhaps a bit too quickly.

Ellie moves her hand to his arm to tug at it. “Look, whatever happens, I’m here for you. Charles would never hate you for something like this, and if he does fuck up and break your heart then come over and we’ll eat an entire pint of ice cream together and cry about it. I can tell you about this asshole David that broke up with me in college the night before Valentine’s Day.”

Ellie and Charles stand where nobody has ever stood before, even the general and their friends on base have wormed their way into his vacant heart, have scraped away the cobwebs and cleaned the place up to make it their own. There’s times where he’s pushed them away intentionally just to get the jump on them before they have the chance to do the same to him, and every time they’ve come right back. The fear is still there, the urge to run, but when he looks down into Ellie’s face, the thought of her just being there where nobody had been before makes him want to cry.

The elevator opens, and they both get off together.

* * *

“Do you want to come over?” Charles asks him at ass o’clock in the morning when the sky is one endless strip of dark blue and the cold outside his covers feels like static when Henry shuffles into his pants before Charles can even finish his sentence.

When he gets there Charles greets him at the door and there’s something about the way Charles looks at him that feels like a warm wave licking up his chest, splashing over his shoulders and plunging him down where his feet can’t touch the bottom. Charles has his elbows overhead, fingers curling on the top of the door frame, standing up on his tip-toes because he’s not quite tall enough to reach otherwise. Like this his body looks stretched out and defined, and Henry can’t help but stare at the way the tendon in Charles’ neck pops out when he turns his head just so, like an invitation and an exclamation mark all at once. 

It all feels so different now, Ellie’s words from just a few hours ago swirling around in his head.

“Hey,” Henry tries to sound casual. He thinks it works.

Charles beams in that wonderful, awful way he always does when Henry musters up a word or two; delighted just to be able to hear his voice. It’s something Henry has felt endlessly flattered about, and now is no exception. Now it hits him with the full force of a freight train, just how deep he might be. 

“I have leftover tacos,” Charles says instead of an explanation, rocking back and forth on his toes. He’s wearing the same clothes he was in at dinner, sans jacket, leaving him in just the white undershirt. It doesn’t look like he’s slept yet. “And I need someone to help me finish them. Come on.”

When Henry doesn’t come in immediately Charles looks up into the sky as if he’d never seen it before, the world around them that wasn’t quite asleep yet not quite awake. After a moment it seems to click. “I hope it’s not too late—”

It is four in the morning.

“—were you sleeping?”

Again, four in the morning, but Henry thinks of the sad little smile Charles would give him if he told the truth, so he shakes his head and tries not to swallow his own heart when Charles eagerly grabs his wrist and drags him inside.

“Thanks for coming over,” Charles says as he lets the door swing shut behind them, the vague warmth that always comes with being inside settling in. Every light in the entire house seems to be switched on and Henry, who’s spent the last twenty minutes sprinting outside after being roused from a dead sleep, feels his eyes burn.

Henry’s brain is still half asleep, fueled by nothing but the leftover buzz of dinner whiskey and two hours of sleep, so he can’t really be blamed when he says: “Why am I here?”

“Um,” Charles stops and turns around to look at him, swallows, face falling so fast it’s a miracle it doesn’t go right through the floor, and it makes Henry regret having said anything at all. “I’m, um. You forgot your shoes.”

Charles gestures lamely at his shoes over by the door. They’ve been lined up nicely next to a pair of dirty running sneakers that shed red dust across the welcome mat. Charles’ voice sounds so small. “I forgot to give them to you at dinner tonight.” 

Maybe it’s just because he hasn’t slept, or the fact that now he feels like an asshole for being so blunt with a man he’s thought about obsessively for the past few weeks, but the urge to cry again like back in the elevator strikes Henry so strongly that he has to take a few seconds to stand there and stare up at the white popcorn ceiling.

To Henry’s horror Charles takes a step forward, hesitates, hands hovering in front of him in startled worry. “Have I done something wrong? I—”

Henry’s lip curls a little involuntarily and Charles sees it, recognizes every microscopic movement in him and its meaning. Henry hates how much he loves Charles for that.

“—I have. Aw man, Henry, I’m sorry. I-I just didn’t get to talk to you at dinner because you kinda ran out before I could catch you then I saw you with Ellie and didn’t wanna bug you, but I couldn’t sleep—”

Henry looks down at him blearily. Charles looks tired. Less put together than usual, with greasy, unwashed hair and bags beneath his eyes Henry has never seen before, so he’s definitely not lying about that. He looks just as bad as Henry feels, and Henry wants nothing more than to fix it.

“—and I guess I kind of forgot what time it was. I wanted to talk to you— It’s stupid, god, I woke you up for a pair of shoes. I’m such an asshole,” Charles says, flopping himself back on the couch. There’s a bag of crisps on the cushion next to him covered in crumbs, so at least Henry knows what Charles has been doing for the past few hours. His hands paw at his eyes.

“No,” Henry says, because Charles is the farthest thing from that. He steps up to the side of the couch, his brows pinched. “What’s going on?”

Charles stays silent, which is even worse, because in the time between their words Henry’s brain comes up with a thousand different things that could be wrong, all more awful than the last, because Charles is only silent when he’s scheming or (god forbid) upset.

“I don’t know,” Charles sighs, pausing briefly to find the words, “can we talk?”

Henry is not prepared for that question at all, rousing the sort of sudden anxiety that makes his fingertips prickle. He brain chants, _he knows he knows he knows_ , and his heart begins its drum-song in his ears. But he nods anyway, because Charles could ask him to do anything and he’d do it.

"Are you and Ellie dating?" Charles asks so hurriedly all the words blend together, not even taking a moment to breathe between syllables. 

Henry's first instinct is to tell Charles, in no short words, _you're absolutely fucking crazy_. His second instinct is to grab Charles roughly by the shoulders and shake those awful, no good thoughts out of his head. His third, and perhaps strongest instinct, is to launch himself out the window and hope the two story fall breaks something on the way down. Luckily he goes with none of the above. 

“What?” Henry does not squawk. He feels blindly in front of him for the couch and sits down when he finds the edge. The crisps packet crinkles with a thousand tiny screams underneath him.

“Are you guys dating?” Charles asks again, a painful pause between each word. He’s not looking at Henry, and Henry has to resist the urge to cup Charles’ chin and tilt his head back where it belongs.

"No," Henry says, a bit louder than intended. "No, no, no." 

Charles looks relieved, but only briefly. "But she told me to talk to you after dinner, and, I thought—"

Henry is going to kill Ellie. He’s going to get her demoted and sent to Siberia where she'll be doing covert operations twenty below zero until she’s eighty. 

—"she was trying to kindly tell me to back off,” Charles finishes. He’s looking at Henry now, finally, and Henry’s not sure if that’s better or worse because it’s a look he doesn’t recognize on Charles’ face.

"Back off?" Henry repeats, before he can stop himself. 

Charles sits up a bit straighter, hands fidgeting in his lap. He looks away again. "Well. You know."

Henry does not know. Henry has wanted to know so much lately, enough to fill novels and dictionaries and old convoluted instructions with everything about Charles. Somehow, he's never wanted to know more than right now.

“What?” Henry says again after a few tense seconds of uncomfortable silence broken only by Charles’ shaky breathing. He feels like he’s spinning.

"You're going to make me say it out loud?" Charles says, like the thought pains him, but he's smiling. "You really are a sadist, and here I was thinking you beat up all those Toppat guys because you just like shiny things. Who knew, my Henry, a sadist! You know a lot of stuff about you makes sense now." 

It takes Henry a dazed second to realize he's being teased. He turns towards Charles and looks at him, really looks at him, his eyes searching and hungry in a way they haven’t been since the first time he laid eyes on the emerald. This feels different, this feels more raw, more personal. Charles has his head away from him but not his body, their knees knock together.

Charles huffs out a laugh. "It's because I like you, I think I’ve liked you since the day we met. When you left I spent so much time missing you that it felt like a dream when you called me! I, I was just so happy to have you back, man, I didn’t care why. When I realized why I just- for the first time I didn’t know what to say to you, so I didn’t say anything.” 

“But when you came over, you know, when I got sick, it took everything in me not to tell you. I didn’t want to hurt you or, or, something,” Charles continues. He’s not smiling, and down in his lap he’s fiddling with his fingers. “So I thought I could just hold out, perseverance and all that. But then you left at dinner, with Ellie, and I’ve spent the whole night thinking about what would have happened if I’d ran after you, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking about it, so..” 

Charles gestures at Henry. He’s still not looking at him but rather down at his feet on the floor in a pair of mismatched grey-pink socks that seem to have about a ten year age difference between them. His hair falls over his eyes in greasy, unwashed clumps, and Henry wants to push them back around his ears like some lovesick puppy he’s just now seeing reflected back at him in his best friend.

Once upon a time Henry had been convinced he lived in a world where nobody would ever understand him, because he lives in a world dictated by a language he could never fully invest in. Words had been easy, but saying them was hard, because every choice he made seemed like some monumental decision that would control what happened and when and how others viewed him. It took hunting to make him realize the only one he could depend on was himself, and it took Charles to make him realize how wrong he was. Looking at him now feels like the start and an end to something all at once, and every door he’s closed to get to this very moment finally feels worth it. 

“Wait, I sound ridiculous. Can I get a do over?" Charles turns suddenly and asks, but Henry's already kissing him, so that's a no.

Kissing Charles is like speaking a language he’s never spoken; he knows how to move his mouth and his tongue but not in the ways that make sense yet, and the first attempt always comes out awkward. They clumsily bump mouths, leaning in, hungry and nervous, and Charles gracelessly leans forward to greet him until he’s only getting Henry’s bottom lip, and after a few seconds of awkward fumbling they both break away, breathless.

“Woah, Henry,” Charles breathes, and he means so much when he says it. It sounds like a question and a promise to things they’ve never said, never even dared to think.

“Yeah,” Henry says, and it sounds like a response to everything that Charles didn’t ask when he said his name. 

“You,” Charles says a little unsteadily, his face is red. “You’re a really bad kisser.”

Henry stops, his face scrunching up like a man who was hiding a lemon slice in his mouth and was trying very hard not to show it. 

“I mean, okay, you’re not _that_ bad,” Charles clarifies in the most ineffective way possible. “I just, I finally found something you’re not good at! Sorry, I just— it’s surprising in like, a refreshing way. I’m just— I’m just gonna shut up.” 

Charles is laughing, but there’s no heat to it. He’s enjoying this way too much. 

In Henry’s defense it wasn’t like he got very many opportunities to practice, and even if he did he wasn’t likely to take them. There had been people in the past, sure. People whose fingers curled around his waist, who bent him in thirds over the edge of a couch in pitch blackness, whose lips touched everywhere but his own as they explored his body. This was a luxury he hadn’t let himself indulge in for so long but desperately wants to get better at.

“Then teach me,” Henry says after a few moments, bunching Charles’ shirt up in his hand, tugging gently.

“Are you sure?” Charles asks, hesitant, but he’s already moving forward before he’s even finished his question, his hand on Henry’s shoulder, their legs pressed together when Henry goes down slow and easy underneath him. 

“Mhmm,” Henry hums, feeling all of sixteen years old again. 

Charles tastes vaguely like leftover tacos and whiskey and it’s a taste Henry can chase forever. They kiss slow and easy this time, then giddy like teenagers, pushing laughs into each other’s mouths when Charles’ leg slips off the side of the couch and almost sends him tumbling down to the floor. Henry hooks his arm around Charles’ waist and hefts him back up on top of him with ease, relishing in the feeling of being weighed down, of the heat pressed between them.

It’s still not great, but it’s better. They only bump noses twice before Henry remembers to tilt his head, and then he tries opening his eyes only to remember how undeniably not sexy it is to make out while staring at someone’s cheek so he closes them again and sinks into the sensation of their lips together. Charles is on top of him, which is a lot less sexy than it should be, because the plastic packet underneath his ass screams bloody murder with every move he makes, and there’s way too much lip and a devastating lack of tongue, but it’s a start.

“Henry,” Charles breathes hot against his ear in a tone that sounds like tires rolling over a gravel driveway; rumbly and smooth and so unlike his normal voice, and it almost liquifies Henry’s spine on impact.

The air is so cold when Charles finally gets his elbows up on the armrest and pulls away, his cheeks flushed and his hair stuck to the sides of his face with sweat, looking like all the fantasies Henry had never dared to indulge in.

"So, uh, just to be clear you're not dating Ellie, right? Or anyone? Because if so this is gonna be really awkward,” Charles laughs nervously, still trying to catch his breath.

Henry hums and shifts so he can run a hand down Charles’ back, trace the knobs of his spine with his finger, just to remind himself that Charles is really there. “Never, no. Uh, you too, right? No?”

This time when Charles laughs it’s boisterous and loud, a laugh he’s never heard him make before. It feels special. “No, no!”

“What about Konrad?” And yeah, okay, maybe he’s still a little mad about the whole Konrad thing at dinner, but it’s not directed towards Charles.

“Konrad?” Charles repeats, and there’s just enough anger in the name alone to put Henry’s heart selfishly at ease. “No, god, we haven’t dated in months, he’s just...Konrad, and he’s an asshole. If you want we can test out the new human cannon on Iron Charles The Great Jr. with him, and, look, I just want you to know I’d do anything for you, not him. Like, hypothetically, if we were stuck in a spaceship somewhere and there was only one escape pod I would definitely just give it to you—”

“No,” Henry interrupts him gruffly, because his grasp on the English language is failing him the longer they’re like this, and his mouth is quickly beginning to refuse to make words unless they’re sucked out of him.

And Charles must see it, because he smiles down at him so loving it hurts. Charles tests a kiss against his forehead, the intimate sincerity of it reducing Henry to nothing but sheer want, feeling Charles’ lips drag across his sweaty skin to nudge up at the square of his jaw. Henry relents, craning his head back, losing himself to the feeling of Charles against him at last, at feeling completed down to the very core of him.

“I want,” Henry breathes, because everything that has come out of his mouth the past few weeks has been stupid, stupider than usual, and now he can’t remember what it’s like to speak without Charles’ lips coaxing the syllables out of him.

“To stay here, with me tonight?” Charles suggests helpfully, curling his fingers into Henry’s shirt, which is a mean way to get his brain to fog over and forget the rest of the English language he’s been grappling to remember.

“Okay,” Henry says, except it sounds like, _please_.

But it’s Charles, so he hears it anyway. He always does.

**Author's Note:**

> Come hit me up in the comments if you have suggestions on anything else I should write about these two dorks! First fic ever so I tried my absolute best and I hope ya'll enjoyed!
> 
> Edit:  
> [Tumblr](https://mediapuppy.tumblr.com/) made by popular request, come yell about stick figures with me


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